Comments on: Class, nation and covenanthttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/
Secularism, religion, and the public sphereThu, 30 Jul 2015 19:53:09 +0000hourly1By: Joost Van Eyndehttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/comment-page-1/#comment-6056
Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:03:17 +0000http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/#comment-6056Gorksi’s argument that Obama’s speech on a “More Perfect Union” was not only about race, but—implicitly perhaps—also about class, nation, and covenant, harkens, I believe, back to the overarching discourse throughout American history about “inclusion” and “exclusion.” Race, class and covenant have always been the crayons with which the contours of the nation were, and are, drawn on the pages of past. Tolerance and inclusion have been elastic notions in American history: from the “visible saints” of the early New England settlements to the racial, ethnic, and religious smorgasbord of contemporary New York. Even categories such as race and ethnicity have not been without the painful contractions and expansions resulting from the pressures of immigration and diversity. In his book, How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev argues that inclusion into the category of whiteness by 19th century Irish immigrants was only possible by excluding African Americans from the same rights they sought to secure for themselves. The boundaries of “Americanness” have tested and strained the resilience of the covenant, a covenant Robert Bellah claims was broken the very instant it was created. Broken is perhaps too much, never fully realized.

Obama’a call to renew that covenant has been drenched in civil religious language and myth, and he has renounced the exclusionary and extolling language of what Gorski calls “crusader nationalism.” Obama has successfully reintroduced the themes of the covenant, the prophetic, and the kingdom of God into the national conversation about inclusion and into the international conversation about a global community. Dialogue has already replaced diatribe. Multilateralism has replaced unilateralism. As Gorski points out, principle has replaced power. Obama’s patriotism stems from a conception of the nation that is rooted in shared memories, but more importantly in shared visions for the future. Though America’s past is mired in ambiguity and abrogation, the future depends—and Obama realizes this all too well—on a collective effort to imagine beyond “our narrow dreams.” Nation has at times been the site of great contention, and nationalism has all but too often produced violence. Whereas the nation for a long time seemed only a figment of the imagination of a powerful few, it now seems to be in a position to once again become the realized dream of an empowered multitude. It is this message of optimism and this vision of hope that President Obama has successfully conveyed in his speeches and his first acts as president.

The war in Iraq, the economic crisis at home and in the world, the impending ecological disaster have presented President Obama with an opportunity to bring the language of class (and all of America seems to find itself in the middle class), nation, and—I would add—globalized community back into the limelight. His acceptance speech bristled with fervor and civil religiosity, and echoed the renewal of the American promise—a promise that cannot be separated from the covenant. “At this moment, in this election,” Obama concludes his speech, “we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.” If civil religion is understood as a faithful devotion to higher ideals, both secular and religious, then it can very well become an unstoppable force for change and renewal—as Obama seems to have understood. The success and failure of civil religion depends wholly and unconditionally on the power of the covenant, both as a religious contract to those higher ideals and a social contract between human beings, who increasingly recognize that the perils of society and, indeed, this world require a joint effort. The prospects for a global civil religion in this volatile world gain a sense of clarity and urgency, but not necessarily feasibility—unfortunately perhaps.

It is here, in this context of interdependence and globalization, that I return to the issue of the nation and covenant, and perhaps in a way also class. The survival of the nation, ironically, depends on the acceptance of its vulnerability. Judith Butler in The Precarious Life makes that very point in relation to the subjectivity. “To foreclose … vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate the most important resource from which we must take our bearings and find our way.” The events of 9/11 were not, as self-proclaimed hellfire prophets Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston spewed, punishment for modernity and secularization, but they were an atrocious and sobering reminder of America’s vulnerability. Butler argues that if we, as individuals, as Americans, as human beings find it within ourselves to embrace that vulnerability, we will have made a covenant that cannot be broken. It is a moment in which the “chosenness” of one people is distributed to all by the mere fact of the human condition. The categories of race, class, and nation remain unfortunately necessary evils we have not yet been able to dispel. And neither has American politics. Obama, in speaking the language of inclusion rather than exclusion, is attempting to transcend these categories, perhaps hoping that the rest of the world will do so as well. Is this then the transcendent character of civil religion—our unwavering quest, aspiration or hope perhaps, to be something beyond what we have been? Is that perhaps what he intends for America? I believe it is.

]]>By: Winnifed Sullivanhttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/comment-page-1/#comment-1661
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 03:40:06 +0000http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/#comment-1661I was delighted to see a post insisting that Obama’s speech was about religion, as well as race. As I read him, Gorski admires Obama’s speech for endorsing civil religion as the best solution to the church-state problem first created in the axial age! Civil religion, at least of the U.S. variety, on Gorski’s reading, calls the democratic polity to fidelity to a secularized version of the biblical covenant between God and his people—a covenant which produces an ethics out of the critique of the community’s actions founded in its own core commitments rather than in God’s commandments.

In doing so, in my view, Gorski robs prophetic religion of its blood, tears and anger, and Obama’s speech of its subtlety.
Obama is doing something more complex and more ambiguous. He is attempting a sleight of hand in which the oppositional religion of the black church is acknowledged without being espoused. Indeed perhaps he does not feel justified in claiming it for his own—given his own biography. But he honors its power, a power that cannot be reduced to ethics. A power of which Langston Hughes spoke when he describes Jesus in his poetry as “the loveliest lynchee.” Obama honors prophetic religious language while insisting that it cannot be the basis of national action. For national action, he does not offer religion, but politics.

]]>By: Charles T. Matheweshttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/comment-page-1/#comment-1649
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:50:48 +0000http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/#comment-1649The discussion of civil religion wasn’t all that sotto voce. The rhetoric he used was obviously deeply theological. By naming the “original sin” of America as chattel slavery, he anchored the historical and political situation at a level of profundity that most people, white and black, feel is the only appropriate one for this crime. As for playing up the connections between union and perfection in the Constitution’s expressed desire to form a “more perfect union,” he did not shy away from the extremely ambitious–dare I say audacious?–and extremely demanding language of moral perfection. But he also acknowledged that this perfection is not available to us as what Reinhold Niebuhr would call “a simple possibility.”

The speech ended with a beginning, not an ending–with a call to renewed effort, not a lullaby to put the nation to sleep. America is a messianic nation, a nation with profound eschatological pretensions, at least from time to time. But Obama was not indulging in self-congratulation. Rather, he urged the nation to take with ever greater seriousness the moral and, indeed, religious obligations that those pretensions put upon all citizens.

And the theological language was not simply frosting on a wholly secular cake. Rather, theology was put to work, naming our condition and illuminating a way forward. Most interesting on this point was Obama’s diagnosis of the nation’s “racial stalemate” as a matter of escapism or avoidance–a problem, he suggested, rooted in our collective failure to engage one another, a failure both political and theological, a failure to be a people and to have hope. His criticism of Jeremiah Wright, among others, was a criticism of Wright’s partial and despairing vision, his insistence that America is “static,” that the proper response to our situation is to reinforce the patterns and expectations we have, rather than step out of them and do a new thing. Furthermore, by framing the choice as one between two stark options, Obama echoed deep biblical patterns. Most obviously, he echoed Deuteronomy: “I have set before you life and death…choose life.” But more than that, he drew from the language of the Hebrew prophets the idea that God is doing a “new thing,” that God is not just a marble edifice but a living God who demands something of the people now and in the future. The theological language was not being used to compliment America, but to obligate it.

This use of “new thing,” it seems to me, is a genuine innovation in the rhetoric of “America as religious mission.” Or if it is not entirely an innovation–after all, the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States does say Novus Ordo Seclorum, “A New Order of the Ages”–it was nonetheless never used in this way (at least not by anyone else from outside Illinois). This enabled Obama to express a faith in God and a faith “in the American people” in such a way that it wasn’t idolatrous, but simply an expression of hope. And, most importantly, he called upon America to begin–to start to do something. This is a use of civil religion not rooted in apocalyptic endings, or titanic final battles between good and evil, but a struggle inside the nation, and inside each soul, between hope and fear.

In all these ways it was easily the most significant public statement on race by a major politician and, at the same time, the most significant addition to the canon on civil religion in America in forty years.

]]>By: Christian Sheppardhttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/comment-page-1/#comment-1648
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:39:31 +0000http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/#comment-1648Pre-saging Obama and King, the champ Joe Louis prophetically pointed out America’s covenant. Supporting the troops during World War II — in addition to volunteering, he donated his purses and drew a private’s measley monthly pay — Louis changed the official prepared text of his public statement from “We Will Win Because God Is On Our Side!” to “We Will Win Because We Are On God’s Side.” He assured reporters afterward that the edit was intentional and his words of civil religious prophecy were printed on posters and pasted up all over. (See the recent excellent documentary on HBO, “Joe Louis: America’s Hero… Betrayed”). I agree that celebrating diversity for its own sake is merely salutary, but perhaps the particular African-American experience of suffering, bondage, humiliation, disenfranchisement, segregation, disrespect, and misunderstanding allows for a privileged perspective. Perhaps history has inoculated the best African-American thinkers, artists, and leaders against nationalist triumphalism, inculcated a tragic sensibility, and cultivated a prophetic vehemence for covenant.
]]>By: William R Burrowshttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/comment-page-1/#comment-1647
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:53:24 +0000http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/03/21/class-nation-and-covenant/#comment-1647Philip Gorski’s analysis and sensitivities to the sotto voce aspects of the Obama speech, message, and persona are spot on. The real question we face in this campaign is whether a message this balanced and yet unmasking the core of what masquerades as political discourse in this country can cut through the gray noise. I will admit to being one of the 67% of Americans who were convinced that Saddam had dangerous weapons and dangerous intentions. I worry that the excesses of the Bush administration in the year leading up to the war and mistaken strategies in Iraq during the first three and a half years during it have so poisoned the atmosphere that we won’t be able to debate our national responsibility as of this moment: i.e., getting out of Iraq while guaranteeing Iraqis what’s required to obtain stability — if we can … and it’s possible that we cannot. On that score, too, Senator Obama’s rhetoric is more assuring to me than Senator Clinton’s. Not only does he realize we need a deep, thorough-going reconciliation on race and class issues, he seems to realize that the nation needs to help sweep up the broken crockery and give Iraqis a fair chance to reopen the store of their national life. Both those who are latte-sipping liberals and latte-sipping conservatives need to tone down the emotional decibel level. Driving home from work yesterday, I listened to Sean Hannity’s show for a half-hour. It was absolutely terrible. Driving to work in the morning I listened to NPR, also for a half-hour. It analyzed the speech solely in political horse race terms; equally terrible. Maybe each had better moments in the hours they were on the air, but I didn’t hear them. We need much more commentary of the sort Philip Gorski has delivered.
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